Friday, May 20, 2011

"Honeymoon with Mom" stars Shelley Long as the mom, and that's all I needed to know to make me want to watch it. Unfortunately, Lifetime movies are best left to the stars of Lifetime, like Meredith Baxter, Judith Light, Alyssa Milano, and Tori Spelling. Watch a real star in a Lifetime movie and you'll just end up depressed. (I should have learned this after watching that movie where Diane Keaton is a meth head.) Lifetime movies are an animal all their own, and it's best to not watch them drag your cinematic heroes into the sludge.

There's a moment, 52 minutes and 30 seconds into the movie, where Shelley Long is the amazing Shelley Long I remember her to be from Cheers and The Money Pit. That moment is when Shelley wears a scuba suit on dry land, and it's about 6 seconds long. Until Hulu pulls it off the interwebs forever, here it is:

OK, now that you've seen the only part of this movie worth watching, you can turn your back on "Honeymoon with Mom" forever. Pretend like it didn't happen, if you wish. Because this movie made me have a saddening realization about Shelley Long: She is not perhaps the A-list super actress I have always thought her to be. At least, she can't pull of acting like Anna Wintour.

One of the many stylish outfits Shelley wears during
the movie to show what a fashion maven her character is.
Shirt: TJ Maxx. Earrings: Pity craft-fair purchase

Yes, that's right, Shelley is the rich Editor-in-Chief of "Style In" magazine, and, like all successful businesswomen, is a horrible mother. She left her daughter with "nannies and drivers" as a child, then puts her on "hold" as an adult!! Though the movie is obvious in its point that Shelley doesn't care about her daughter's life, she's also somehow simultaneously meddlesome and annoying. She says every annoying-mom cliche ever written throughout the movie, including such favorites as "don't put those in a drawer, they'll wrinkle," and old-time classics like "a mother worries." When she finds out her daughter is going to be married, she also voices every stereotypical mother-of-the-bride complaint ever written: the boyfriend isn't rich enough, his family is too rich, his Dad is a lame-o podiatrist, etc.

The daughter flirts with a handsome
rebound guy over the film's most-
expensive prop, a dead pig.

Luckily for her, her daughter gets left at the altar...and when Shelley finds out that they had booked a honeymoon at the Hawaii hotel owned by a certain retired astronaut, she jumps at the chance to go with her daughter. Why? Because a cover story about the astronaut will give her magazine "a jump on the competition," of course! There's nothing stylish ladies love more than reading about retired astronauts!

You won't be surprised to hear that during their vacation, Shelley ends up falling in luv with the astronaut while she and her daughter become closer than ever before. Unfortunately, the production values on this movie are so low that they didn't even pay for music to accompany the "getting to know you" montage that contains that awesome 6-second scuba clip.

Which got me wondering...why was Shelly doing this movie anyway? Is a free trip to Hawaii really enough for her these days? (Sure, this came out in 2006, before her brilliant stint as the mom on Modern Family, but still!) Everyone who's in the movie who's not Shelley Long is a total dud, and I began to feel really sorry for her. Shelley Long is better than this!...Isn't she? A visit to her IMDB page confirmed my slowly realized suspicion. One of the four movies it says she's known for is "A Very Brady Sequel." No "Troop Beverly Hills," the greatest movie ever made about a girl scout troop? Or "Hello Again," the greatest movie ever made about a woman who comes back from the dead and her husband is remarried and she falls in love with Gabriel Byrne? Sadly, it's possible that I'm just attached to Shelley Long because she made some awesome movies when I was 7.

There's really not anything else to say about this abysmal movie except for that it may have the worst beginning of any Lifetime movie ever, and that's including the beginning of the Hilary's Swank's "Terror in the Family" ("My mom! She's...bleeeeding!" OK, nevermind, that opening is awesome, it always makes me giggle). For one, it begins with the daughter doing a voice-over, along with a flashback scene of her playing with dolls as a kid. And it ends with her and her husband coming out of the church after their wedding, which never actually happens--as I've said, he leaves her at the altar. In other words, it's dumb and makes no sense. I really wish they had started the movie with that scuba scene.

1 comment:

This is a riot. I enjoyed that scuba scene too. Kinda curious -- do you enjoy these movies in a this-is-so-awful it's great way (isn't that sort of the definition of Lifetime movies) or are they just plain awful to watch.